Take the Online Expressway to Food Safety Education

Thompson says technology does not seem to be a barrier for her students; she has found that most of them have computers and Internet access. “These people are fairly computer savvy,” she says. “The real stumbling block could be age, not computers.” For that, she suggests the possibility of “grandfathering in” older employees, though they would not be eligible for advancement without certification.

Thompson is still busy devising and testing her online course and does not expect to roll it out for another 18 months. But she thinks her two-step option will prepare students for whichever national exam they decide to take upon completion. Thompson firmly believes that online courses are the future. She has compared in-class learning with online learning and has found no difference in the scores of the two groups. “We can track our students online; they can email me with questions at any time.” Her verdict on online learning: “If I knew that they passed the national exam, I don’t care how they learned it.”

Online Food Handler Course

Offering yet another online course for food handlers, the RFA is dedicated to using “science and scientific data to create a uniform food code for the retail foodservice industry” and to “providing online food safety training to prepare students” to take the national test for certification. The RFA’s Davis, an executive chef who has taught other food handling certification courses, sees several benefits in online learning

• Students can work at their own pace;
• A computer is less intimidating than an instructor;
• Online help is readily available;
• Material can be taught in several languages;
• Material can be studied at a student’s convenience; and
• Some people don’t work well in classroom situations and prefer to learn alone.

What makes a good online course? Davis thinks it must be well written, clear, and simple to understand, and it must be available in languages such as Spanish, Chinese, or Vietnamese, “since many of our food workers speak these languages.” Finally, he says, the online course must be written in computer code simple and fast enough for dial-up connections. “Many students live in rural areas where broadband is not available,” he says.

He also thinks that online courses may actually help young people learn better. “Today’s generation does not learn well the way most baby boomers had to. The video games, video logs, and multimedia tools they are exposed to on a regular basis—you need to have more interesting ways of presenting the information to have it learned quickly and remembered,” Davis says.

Davis believes the RFA has accomplished all these objectives with its online food certification course. It is divided into 15 lessons studied at each student’s pace. Clear graphics and illustrations help students learn the material. There are quiz questions accompanying each lesson to ensure that important points and concepts are mastered before advancing to the next lesson (See, “A Lesson on Bacterial Growth Curves,” p. 47).

The $100 course is an intensive one, with each lesson requiring about an hour to complete. The review quizzes offer feedback on each lesson. Davis says students are well equipped to take the national certification exam after completing the RFA course. Some, he adds, have gotten perfect scores.

These courses illustrate the density and complexity of the material that must be mastered for food handler certification. It is made even more difficult, both Davis and Thompson say, by conflicting information in the USDA and FDA standards, some of which is outmoded and not scientifically based.

“They have different time and temperature tables that are using figures from the ’50s,” says Davis. “The up-to-date work is not included.” This, he says, causes difficulty and confusion. Teachers must “teach to the test,” but chefs live in the real world—and “a lot of the industry is outside the law”—especially when cooking rare beef.